All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - #AIS: Bestie AMA with Valor's Antonio Gracias

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

This talk was recorded LIVE at the All-In Summit in Miami and included slides. To watch on YouTube, check out our All-In Summit playlist: https://bit.ly/aisytplaylist 0:00 Antonio Gracias joins to talk: Tesla's early days, investing in Elon, macroeconomic outlook, ROIC, importance of energy independence, future of manufacturing, financial-ization of the P&L & more 22:35 Q: How has the poker game influenced your decision making in business and life? 29:33 Q: What was the scariest step of becoming a first-time fund manager? 32:34 Q: Crypto market unwinding & how it relates to the money supply 35:57 Q: Current pre-seed / seed valuations & metrics 38:58 Q: When investing in early-stage SaaS companies, how to find outliers? 42:11 Q: What would you do if dropped in the middle of Kansas at age 25 with no resources? 44:46 Q: Where will the next disruptions in industrial automation come from & how will the US hit economies of scale in semiconductor manufacturing 47:02 Q: Any plans for All-In Media? 50:02 Q: US strategy in the Russia/Ukraine War 54:19 Q: How have your first impressions changed as you've matured in your career, and whose first impressions have stood out to you the most? 58:29 Q: Are you interested in crypto micropayments? 1:00:55 Q: Biggest mistakes of your career that you've learned the most from? 1:09:54 Q: What impact could tech have on political discourse? What does a viable path forward look like? 1:15:36 Q: Are remote / distributed startup systems viable coming out of the pandemic? 1:19:41 Q: Advice for non-technical people trying to get into the startup world? 1:24:44 Q: Thoughts on the potential consumer credit crisis? 1:26:17 Lightning round: What problem do you most want to solve right now? All-In consortium? Can SMBs democratize their own labor supply? How to get more investors interested in hardware? Will this be a relatively short recession? Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

I'm going to leave! Or let your winners ride. Bring man David Sack. I'm going to leave! And I said we open-source it to the fans and they've just got a lot of reason with me. Love you, Sack. Queen of King, I'm going to leave!

Antonio, Elon had a moment of reflection and he was talking about 2008, he was talking about the imminent collapse as he felt of SpaceX and Tesla at the same time in December 25th and he said there were just a handful of people who came out there and put their careers online for him. Your shelf and Steve Jervison specifically mentioned in Iowa and it was a particularly poignant moment for him. He was getting a little chucked up about it. Tell us about that that you made in 2008, and the potentially career ending bet for you to bet in an electric car company at that moment.

Take us back to that decision. Yeah, but before I do that, I just want to say that I left my wallet at Backstage because the last time I was with the four of you, I lost a lot of money. And I realized I better leave all the cash somewhere where you can't get it. And you also made me cry. So I think I might cry again now. Of joy? I mean, no, no, it was more like a communication.

Yeah. But we're playing poker. Yeah, we're playing poker. You pulled a parmer lucky. You pulled a parmer. Yeah. No, so if I cry again this time, it will be from a sense of just gratitude for those moments

that we got to share. So for Austin, particularly because our strategy is so operational, I was there working on supply chain and the factory and on sales in that period, along with my partner Tim Watkins and three or four of our supply chain people. And we had a major problem in supply chain the cost for where I control.

And you know, you know, you know, when I was doing engineering other very expensive parts, we were doing the, I call it the B parts, they had the B parts. And man, it was brutal. But it was very clear to us that, and remember, it was also the middle of financial crisis, right? So we had a treasure portfolio, we had to decide,

we did have a lot of capital times, these are tiny funds, 120, 300 of our funds, where our capital go, where our people go, more importantly, where our people go, and where I would go. And we decided to focus on Tesla because, first, we really did believe in Elon, when most people didn't. And we saw in him something very special,

which I think you probably saw here yesterday, that not only is he is a brilliant, brilliant engineer, one in a hundred-year kind of engineer, he's a man of deep conviction and deep passion and deep compassion. What he is doing is really trying to bend the arc of humanity for all of us because he really cares. And that came through to us and we wanted to be on that mission with him. And so we were pillaging off to be there at a moment time that it mattered and it was really hard man. I mean, we had clients, I had actually had a client said to me, that it mattered. And it was really hard, man. I mean, we had clients.

I had to have clients said to me, how do I know this isn't DeLorean? And I said, look, I can tell you for a fact, we are not selling cocaine out of the back of the factory in the cars. Yeah. There's no... DeLorean being the famous back to the future car. Exactly. Where the owner was trafficking cocaine to underwrite the car.

Exactly. I mean, even Miami, even in Tony Garossi's born not sellingwrite the car. Exactly. I may live in Miami, but in the event of Tony and Grasis, we were not selling cocaine for sure. That I'm sure. Yeah, but no, it was a career, it was a career betting event for us, and it turned out right. It was right there you do. But yeah, for me, it was, I'm just

deeply grateful with these experiences. But I mean, you really doubled down, because you didn't just do Tesla. You also were there in some really critical moments at SpaceX as well. We were, although I tell you, you know, we doubled down at the time in Tesla, we put more money in Tesla and then we'll finish a crisis and then help lead a convert round there that was really tough for us to do and then put money in SpaceX. But I tell you operationally, like in terms of capital stack, I think there were other people around and SpaceX is also

running out of money and so we put money to SpaceX. Operation we were to space over the years, but it was never as existential in terms of the operations so it was a Tesla. I mean, Tesla was truly, I think, truly existential and because we were operating guys, and I myself had been a factory manager, I worked in all parts, in all parts of the factory, I'd run industrial facilities myself,

we could kind of unique that value there. In the rocket factory, we were just less valuable. But yeah, both these companies were going down at the same time and the amount of stress we were all under was extraordinary. But looking back on it, it's one of the greatest moments of my career. I mean, this sense of fellowship, I think the great thing about being in our business, the business we are all in, is that we get to back amazing people that are trying to change the world, and in these dark, dark, deep moments, we get to go to war for them.

And in those moments, I call them these moments of fellowship where you just care deeply about someone and passion about the mission and you get to make a huge difference. Like these are the highlights of my career. And if you ask my partners, they've tied the same thing. These are the best moments. We've had some together.

Three of us have had some together, actually we all had some together. Here on the stage, we had a fight for something we believed in. And it's a privilege man to do it. It's a privilege of an association, it's privilege to be the Elon, it's been a privilege to be there with all of you at different moments in my career. And I'm very grateful for it. How do you feel like you come off of a high after having huge successes like that?

Like how do you stay grounded and motivated to try to find the next one? If in the back of your mind there must be a little piece that says it's never going to be as good as this guy or those two things. I mean, it's an interesting question, Voth. I think that there's a couple things to play for us. One, is we keep going because we believe in making it a little better. We invest in companies that we believe make a difference with people we respect and we're guys lined with and that's the ethos

of our firm, right? So whether it's large or small, we may never find something that's as important as it has with SpaceX again, but we will find more great people and we will help them. Two of our companies here, I mean, we invest in an Android-O with Palmer, we have a small investment flex port,

which should be one of the biggest mistakes the last 10 years of my career is. Not putting more money on flex port. Yeah, no, we had to do, we actually, it's kind of a funny story about, we had, you know, let's say kind of a soft handshake on a term sheet at say a price of X and in soft-think came in like you later made it 2X and I had too much price memory to keep going and co-lead it. So there's an error. But you had two people on the stage here, they're screwing entrepreneurs,

they're trying to make the world better. Both these companies are really great and making the world much more. Pretty now it was COVID and in times of war, making it much safer for all of us. There are people like that out there. There's more of them. They may not be Elon. You know, it was probably one Elon our generation, but there's lots of great people. And I'm very optimistic about it's happening now in the economy. We're seeing incredible incredible innovation with tremendous entrepreneurs in our pipeline. So maybe there's another one.

I don't know. Antonio, how do you think about the, in the business as you guys invest in, there can sometimes be a very long capital deployment cycle before you see any real return in terms of business value, whether it's farm I know you've done farm some of these hardware companies where there's a big build cycle. How much do you need to kind of think about and see a customer and revenue show up before you're willing to say hey let's build the big rocket ship to go to the friggin

moon and how do you judge and value that business and back a team? It's a really big question. It depends on this sector. It depends on how we look at the world share probabilistically. And we're looking for companies that we call pro and Trevor, where they get bad and the world gets worse. So in the case of pharma or something like SpaceX, we'll think about like what is our probability tree here, which are probably the laws, probably of 3X, 5X, 10X, 100X. And then we'll think about when the capital goes in, what is the actual return on capital? I was watching the talk you guys had with Ryan about what happens to the public markets.

The reality is that a business is a machine, you put capital in one side and out the other side comes return. The ROIC return to the capital really matters. And if you're a climate class that we train investor the way I am, we think about that a lot. So I have no way we may be putting a lot of capital in, the question is what's the margin in the backend, a company that SpaceX, a lot of capital is going in, but we know that if it works, we believe it will work, we're ultimately have a company that has tremendous margins, even the industrial sector, because of the industry

structures in, it lives in an oligopoly inside the US and outside the US. So it's like building a startling, same thing, capital going in, but we know that the margins and the profitability of that business on the back end will be very, very high. And so the ROIC will be very good. Are you back in a lot of deep tech startups? Like companies, a founder shows up with a power point. They're like, I need 50 million bucks to make our prototype. I mean, what happens there? It depends on the business. So as an example, we have passed on things that are, our view going to have margins that are ultimately

competed to a low, a low level. And, you know, there are, I don't want to give examples here, but there are lots of examples of people that are doing things in, you know, I call it electric aircraft, VTOLs, etc. We look at this and say, this is going to be a highly competitive market, these are not NNF1. SpaceX is the NNF1. If you compare that to someone making an electric vehicle that say an electric airplane or electric V-tall, that will not be the NNF1. It will be the NNF many. And in NNF many business, you're ultimately

going to have a margin competition that's going to make it that return on capital goes down to basic industrial margins. You know, it won't be that much better than the Bell and George R.O.S.E. or Airbus as R.O.S.E. because those will be ultimate competitors. You said it a little too, I think superficially, so let me just double-click. And I think Antonio brings up, I think, one of the most important principles of investing

that is so utterly poorly understood, which is ROIC, RRIC, return on invested capital. Most people don't even know what it means, how to calculate it, no pat over your weighted average cost to capital. These are enormously fundamental principles when you're running a business, especially in a moment like this. Because when the rubber meets the road and you need a lot of money,

and you run into somebody as sophisticated as him, he's already worked from first principles to understand it. It's really, really, really important to know these things. Because these are the core foundations of valuation, so obviously DCFs are one framework, but Royk is incredibly, incredibly important, especially when you make real things,

and you need to spend CapEx. It looked in a world in the last 10 years where money's free, nobody thinks about this very much. We always have thought about it, which informs our investment model, but yeah, Jim Moss write, I mean, in today's world, if you're an entrepreneur and you can show up and say, listen, I have a 50, 60, 70% return to capital every dog you give me, who yield a 70, 80% return to the back end, even though

we're losing money along the way, that's a very compelling case. Well, to, hey, we're losing a bunch of money, we're not sure what's going to happen, which we'll be here a lot. This also builds on the question from yesterday, which is, how do you present yourself as, you know, a young emerging company and cut through all the noise and understanding of these things and about future value creation in a moment like this becomes really important as well. Even if people will debate whether it's right, people will give you credit for the intellectual honesty of actually going there and understanding these things.

You see it a lot where companies slip away from first principle. So, you know, the first principle is on a high margin enterprise software business. You can define ARR and assume some, and then people say, hey, some multiple of ARR is your valuation comp like your, you know, your multiple. And then another company shows up and the margins are different, the growth profile is different, the revenue retention is different,

it's a services business, and they try and use a similar sort of comp and all of a sudden everyone's thinking about valuation as a function of some industry standard comp as opposed to going back to understanding how did that comp get created in the first place and what's the nature of the business from which that comp arose and people are doing things like calling revenue ARR, not even subscription revenue and so on, and I think that happens considerably more. And then that investing cycle just becomes, hey, well, the next round will be this multiple. And that's how we'll get our incrementing valuation. And everyone just misses the core proposition

of building a valuable business. It can generate. What's your look through into the economy just from your portfolio companies? Look, we think I think we're in a session. I mean, I don't know if someone's already said this, but we're in a session. We're in a session.

And this will be like my, I don't know, 100 cycles or something. I'm pretty old, but like the rest of us here, we've seen it, we've seen it over and over again. You know, I see Davis tweets about go race to anaphyrus and money, this is correct. I mean, you need enough capital to get through the problem. The good news about this recession,

and there are some good news here, which is, to me, if you look at the macro picture here, it looks like, if you can look at the modifedal debt, the state of the consumer, and what's happening with this information, it actually looks a little like post-World War II to me. In the World War II period, we had the last massive mobilization or demobilization that our economy occurred in World War II. That happened again in COVID.

When we, in this case, it's's a mini version of re-emobilization that we're restarting the economy. We thought of the system with money to get it to get buffer the problem and restart the economy. And now we have inflation, but we also have lots of business formation, and we have new ways of doing work, which is what happened after War II. So I'm very optimistic, because most of these recessions truly get inflation down. We're going to have to reduce consumer demand and or change all prices.

So for sure, we should be pointing on this country. I know it's not, it's controversial, but that's important to lower all prices and get inflation down. But the reality is underneath the numbers, there's a lot of innovation happening, and that's what happened kind of post World War II. So I would say we're in a bit of a miniatooling. It's going to be a rough year or two, hang on, it will be a rough year or two, but the consumers in pretty good shapes, they're not overleabored, we should

come out okay, and the US economy is so resilient man, like you know we are all either one generation from being immigrants here, I think most of us right, it's the best place in the world to live with the most innovative economy in the world, I'm super optimistic what's happening here, because there's so much innovation, so many smart people working so hard to make things better, I think it's going to be great. I think we get the next couple of years going to be great. Talk about this pumping more oil situation. Obviously, Russia is involved in a, and we talked about earlier today, had a debate about Ukraine. And then you have maybe some folks in the Middle East not pumping as much oil as we might like them to and then you're up decided.

Well, we don't want to frack here. We want you to do that over there and then we stopped here and none of us want to see environmental damage done to the planet. But we also don't want to see dictators take over the planet or the economy come to a halt. What's a reasonable proposal for America? Yeah. And American sovereignty in terms of green and renewables and maybe pumping some oil. So look, we were the first institution investors as a motors. So I think I have an up one of the fittings to say this, I believe in green technology, okay? Absolutely 100 percent. But energy and in the same fund we did Tesla, we actually had

fracking assets because energy independence is a- Well that's incredible really. Yes. In the same fund. In the same fund. Because then as it is today, energy independence is a national security issue. This is not a partisan issue. Extreme important people understand this. issue. This is not a partisan issue. Extreme important, you understand this. Extreme important, you understand this. It's not about those Republicans. It's about wars in the Middle East. And the reality is that the Saudis are not pumping. OPEC is not pumping. This is terrible for America and they know it. They're squeezing their economy away within the 70s. And it's absolutely doing done on purpose.

So the answer to that, in my mind, is twofold. One, we should have an industrial policy jump in this country, but the first one we should have is an energy policy. Energy policy looked like this. We take all of the background subsidies, literally make them equal. And we give, let's say, 500 billion total,

250 billion in low cost loans to the energy patch for drilling in places like Texas Louisiana and an equal amount to green energy. And we sprint to a green future. At the same time, we ensure that this country is safe. And we have energy security in this country for all the people out there being hurt behind inflation. It's a security problem.

And you guys invest heavily in manufacturing? What do you see in terms of the future of manufacturing, the opportunity for ensuring manufacturing? Are there technologies that you guys are excited about that create an advantage for the United States to build manufacturing capacity to serve as industry here? Yeah, look, I think this thing about, we outsource the entire,

our entire manufacturing base in China because it was cheaper. But the reality is that the, if we have been, the productivity is between is between the US and China right now is about 8 to 1. So a US worker is 8 times more productive than a Chinese worker. We found in cases like Tesla where we actually helped read... In terms of GDP per worker? Yes.

And we helped to insource the supply chain of Tesla. Why is Tesla flinting rated? Because I got news for you. You actually can make stuff in America. And it's made to be shocking. Shocky. Shocky. Okay.

Let me tell you. When you put... What is the... Why do we have this narrative that it can't be done? And then we go to get your factory and you see it. Let me tell you why. Having been done. Let me tell you why.

And boy, I mean, here's this... I'm probably gonna get pillared for saying this, but great companies are built by engineers like Elon Musk. That's a reality of it, and they know they want to control their manufacturing. We do it here, so we can iterate faster and make the product better, and the products good enough, you'll sell it for a great margin. They optimize for marketing people and destroy it by the CFO. When you put the finance guy in charge and he's like, oh, hey, we can get a lower peace part by standing at the China, but he doesn't understand the iteration cycle of making that product.

That guy just tours the company. And that's what happened in America. Being countersed. Yeah, we put the CFOs in charge. We've got to say, don't do that. Fuck these being counters. I mean, can I say that? Fuck that.

Let me say that. Let me say that. Let me say that. If you calculate, return invested capital, and you think about this carefully, what happens is these long supply chains that Asia, they have huge capital deployed, but if the capital's cheap, you do that because the peace part price is cheaper. But what happened in Tesla in particular, when you calculate the overall cost in capital

wasn't free because you didn't get any, it was actually much smarter to bring it back. All right, so the long term cycle, you make more money. The short term cycle, you make less money. The short term cycle, you make more money. I mean, is that another way to think about it? I have to rise, you optimize. Well, short term outcomes.

You improve the, you improve the income statement, because you might improve properly in the short-term, but you actually hurt the balance sheet, because you settle this capital on the water over the China and you're there bringing it back, and your iteration cycle goes down. So what you're saying is that products less innovative for you to do that. It is, but he's saying something really important, which is that it's the financialization of the PNL that in some ways led to the decline of American manufacturing in part, meaning,

if you're a CEO of a business and you construct your employment agreement, and it's based on a certain kind of earnings, in a certain period, a certain earnings per share, the incentive to then drive financialization goes up. Now, the perfect example of this is, if you compare it, for example, and you did this, the comp package that you gave Elon in 2018,

versus the comp package that any other CEO in America got, it was completely black and white. It was opposite land. And you basically completely said, you get nothing now. Let's set these extreme goals. And then if you can hit it, you'll get compensated. So much so that when you had glass Lewis and ISS.

I said no, no, right? The ISS class who has said no, but they used it in most things. And we're being sued for it. So I got to care for what I'd say about it. But yeah, we had a compact, fully-vote, and equity appreciation that required creation of new products. And look, I'll pick on Apple here.

Apple's the first stock I ever bought. I was 12 years old. My mom actually went to Okent back and bought me a few shares of Apple. I still have it in my account, remind me what it takes to a very company. Steve Jobs dies, terrible. And look, Tim Cook takes it over.

Tim Cook's a splicing guy. guy I mean they've really optimized profitability. It's unbelievable to you know Two trillion dollar mark gap or something now, but man, when's the last thing in your product? Air pods air pods Yeah, I mean the great great product great products, but I mean Ancheon's life incredible free cash flow. Yeah, they could aggressively buy back their thoughts It's a great financialization of that company. Yeah has attracted. I mean back their stocks. Yes, it's a great... ...financialization of that company has attracted, I mean, if you look at a... If you can look at the largest shareholder,

is the most sophisticated financial asset owner in the world, Berkshire. Berkshire doesn't buy technology companies, they buy incredibly well-run financial assets. And it is. Look at how Zuxk getting lambasted for the VR investment. Some might say that strategically it's not a great investment, but he saying fuck it i'm gonna spend ten billion dollars a year no no he said it for a quarter and then he had to take it back and cancel

oh yeah they took it back yeah yeah that's what you wanted to do uh... and so to your point like it's very hard to really build things now yes but it can be done and look i think one of i am it was in the world today, geopolitically, is tragic. The war we are experiencing in Ukraine is absolute tragic. But from all tragedies, come some good things.

There's always a civil lining. And one of the civil lining, sir, I think, should be the acceleration of reshoring of all these products into America to rebuild our industrial base, because we actually can do it. I can tell you, I am, start of my career my career basic is a factory manager in California. It can be done There are Americans who want to make stuff between here Mexico, Canada We can make pharma we can make high-tech products. Yes, the price might be a little higher But I got to tell you iteration will be better and your value will be better if the product is better people will pay for it

And resiliency and resilient listen for 100% 100% for it. And resiliency. And resilient. Listen, for 100%. Alright, we are setting up a couple of microphones here. Antonia has been gracious enough to join us for some Q&A. The audience is filled with entrepreneurs, capital allocators, artists, and builders. So we're going to put a couple of microphones out there. Hopefully some lights on the microphones if I can see them. Line up, and remember the rule. We don't need to know about your company just a tight concise question Anybody does any marketing or promotion? We're all gonna grow. Let's practice the ground three two No guard you can say your name you can say your favorite. Also wait before we start yeah if Chris is Chris Maloy

Okay Everybody you guys may want to just know Chris. Whenever you're in Vegas, Chris is the guy at Carbone in Las Vegas, which is the most, you know, best restaurant reservation to get. But Chris bought a bottle of wine for us that we can open now and drink. What?

Oh, well, bring up a bottle of wine. And of course, Chris Maloy, say, I don't get his number and text him if you're ever in Las Vegas and want to hi to him. Get his number and text him if you're ever in Las Vegas. You want to go to him. Get that hat. I mean, only Chimoff would bring the captain of carbon to our event. Oh, could you drink?

Let's drink to one. Let's do it. And said, testing. Oh, nice to meet you. All right. First question, tell us your favorite bestie. And then, yeah, we're still doing favorite besties, right? Favorite bestie.

And then, a quick, tight question. Go. All right, favorite bestie, Jake, point out of the century to this team. So how it's off to have a quick, tight question. Go. All right. Favorite Bestie, Jake, out. Point guard of the century to this team. So how it's off to you. My question is, first of all, we've been here all week. In the last three days, watching these cards fall from the sky. Yeah.

And we all know that you guys center around this poker table, this beautiful game. My question is, how is that game influence both your relationships and decision-making and business and your personal lives? Great question. Chimath started us up and you can go to the back and the next person to you up. How is poker in front? A friendship or a lives? How is the poker game itself had an impact on our lives? I think I really do believe this but I think it's the most incredible game and training ground for business because

in any given moment you are forced to deal with the spectrum of good information, to moderate information, to bad information, good outcomes, moderate outcomes, bad outcomes, you're taking risk, you're learning information, you're adjusting your style, and the most important thing is you're forced to anchor to your core values or not. How you behave at the table is how you behave in life. You know, you can take these wins poorly. That's like a new skill helmet. Yeah, yeah.

You can take these wins poorly. You can take these wins well. You can take the losses poorly. You can take the losses well. I would encourage all of you to learn to play the game with your friends. It's it's a beautiful beautiful start a weekly game Sacks well, they put the game at Jamal South is how I got to be friends with small, right? I mean I'm just saying this with you guys. Tell you why is why you stay up all night playing Yeah, I've been there with you guys. Yeah, it's pretty freaking degenerate

because I've been there with you guys. It's pretty freaking degenerate. Yeah. We're all holding hands. Exactly. Talking about it. Maybe it's training. It's training for business. No, you're just trying to be a business.

I'm kidding you, but I've been there. I've been there. I've been there. I've seen the drinking in the food too. It is training for business. We're not degenerates, but we're not actually. Well, I was just saying, Jamal, I mean, didn't you invest in the hammer after I started playing

in your weekly poker game? Yeah, and it was actually so degenerate, what really happened after that? What's I was in Las Vegas in 2011? I had just left Facebook, I moved to Vegas. And I was on the phone with Sachs in between playing tournaments. And he let me in, invest in the Amher, literally.

And you know, you did mean incredible solid because I put money in. And know what this is like nine months later he sells to Microsoft and I returned a third of my first fund. Oh yum yum. And it really solidified my reputation so I mean I owe you a big one for that. Well I got a story about this though. So David sells, I don't David for 25 years. He did Yammer I want to tell you about this though. So David says, I don't know David for 25 years. He did Yammer, I want to put money in it.

He said no. Because it's a... LAUGHTER This is a two story. He said no, he said no. He said no because of this fails, you are my backup plan. Oh, great job. Yes.

Wait a minute, hold for me. You know, hold for me a job. I want to David to come join me. I was so afraid of losing everyone's money when I found out a company, you know? You know, it took a little time for me. I wanted to do to come join me. I've just tried to do it. I was so afraid of losing everyone's money when I found out a company, you know? You know, it took a little time for me. I wanted to have like one friend who's my head in, I didn't lose, but you know,

that was the long way of thinking about it. We should have, we should have. Freeberg? I mean, how is the game? Well, I'll, before, Tommat, are you leaving? No, I'm, no, no, come back for a sec. Okay. He'll get glasses, okay.

He's getting one. I'll tell you guys, one thing, Tommat is one of the most generous people you'll ever meet. Okay. He'll get glasses. He's good. Yeah, one. I'll tell you guys, one thing, Chimoff is one of the most generous people you will ever meet. It's unbelievable. He is unbelievable. Unbelievable. And for all of his bluster about his friggin'

mink coats and shit, like, Chinchilla, it's Chinchilla, he has brought together a group and he largely is the reason that I think the game grows and goes on. And you saw some of the amazing people that we've had on stage here. Some of our friends are here that we play in our game with. That really, that network has been built and solidified because of Chimath and his generosity and friendship. That's, it's really something I've learned to appreciate in my life.

Thank you. I think so. Yeah. I mean, it's a tremendous group. And yeah. Amazing people. Amazing people. Amazing people. And the consistency of it has been amazing.

And the general recruit. Chimoff had this little tiny $2 million house with a 1.5 car garage when he was at Facebook. And we would play in the garage. That little tiny place you had, remember? Before you bought the two houses next door and knocked them down and gentrified. But your story, Sachs said, hey, you're doing these conferences, you should invest in the companies. And this is when I put the fix in for him to win TechCrunch 50 at Yammer.

With Yammer, he said, I have to win. And then his wife told my wife, he asked the win. So then I basically got the whole jury to vote for him with Yammer. And he goes, hey, Schmuck. All my success is due to J-Cal. You guys understand? Yeah.

It was a good fix. I put the fix in for him. But he said, listen, I want to thank you for this. And you should start a fund. Instead of doing all this work at the conference, why don't you just invest in the companies. I'll put 250K into your fund. I'll be the anchor.

I said, it's incredible, really, and he said, yeah, and then I went to the poker table, I told the story, and then Dave Goldberg, Reston Piste, one of our great friends, and certainly the best amongst us. Thank you. He said, I'll put money into it. Thank you. And he put money in, and then Billy said, I'll put money in, and everybody said they put money in, freeberg said that I'll take a pass

But you know we'll put that aside anyway I was all locked up another stuff. Yeah, I got a kid wash farm. I've got Fellowship and this is a true this is a true story. Bill Lee's there. He couldn't make it to here, but he's one of our great friends and one of Elon's best friends in the world. And he said, of course, I'm in. Would you mind if I tell our billionaire friend, the co-founder of eBay, Jeff Skull?

And he tells him, Jake, how's doing to find you should do it? I meet Jeff Skull. And he tells him, Jake, how's doing a fun, you should do it. I meet Jeff Skull's money manager, and, Yon, and I said, hey, here's what I'm doing. I'm a first-time fund manager. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I'm a former journalist. And he said, how much is the fun?

I said, 10 million. He said, I'll take half. And I said, oh, I'm sorry. And he said, I'll take five million. And that was the biggest chuck ever got, and it was, I'll take five nine. And that was the biggest check I ever got, and it was because of Billy. And literally that first fund was raised around the poker table in one night.

And that changed the trajectory of my career. And that really is the fellowship and it started with David and you hosting. And I remember it as I guess today. I think maybe also a good moment to just maybe cheers to Goldie. Dave Goldberg. No longer with Anthony Shay who played in the game as well. Too incredible, man. Next question.

Hey, there's Bobbin. Favorite Bestie is Trimoth. Great to be your boss tonight. Thank you, boss. I guess. Antonio is also our people too. Alright, listen, we know Tramach is the best equipped with the question.

Let's go. My question is like, when you guys actually decided to manage capital for people, like what really was the scariest step in taking that leap and taking that risk? I know a lot of you are GP solid GP, so. I mean, Sack, you made a big leap. What's the scariest step? Well, I mean, even as, the big leap. Was the scariest step?

Well, I mean, even as a founder, like I mentioned before, I was so worried about losing people's money. I mean, that was like, I don't know if founders today even care that much that this seems, but... It seems like, oh, coming to work, move on to the next one. I mean, maybe that'll change now that the environment is not going to be as free-flowing. But I was always like really worried I was going to lose people's money.

And it was something sort of coming up. I remember when I started social capital, I think I was playing, I was either playing golf or I had dinner with Chase Coleman in New York. And Chase says to me, I'll tell you, the one piece of advice Julian gave me when I started Tiger Robo, I said, what was that? This is a 2000 money, and he said, this is a death sentence.

And I was like, well, what does that mean? And he said, you are the only person that's going to live with this because you're responsible, especially based on who your LPs are. For folks that if you really think about who they are, it's just going to create this thing there. And it's like, you know, I was lucky in that moment because we were able to get like the night foundation and Mayo clinic and These folks that are doing these good works, but then you're representing their capital

It's heavy. It's heavy because you make this decision Yeah, and if it's wrong, you just feel literally like you're derelict and you're taking money away from sick children or you know Free speech. I mean it's it mean, that's a brutally stressful thing to lose money on behalf of people. By the way, I'll recommend that as a founder, if you raise money, raise money from your friends too. And they'll really change how you operate. Yeah, I mean, I raised the first fund from my friends,

and I tell you, I took every single deal very seriously, and I did my diligence, and I was very thoughtful about it. How about you, Antonia? Oh man, our first fund, there are two fears I had. The first one was raised from, I live in Chicago, from my friends in Chicago and I literally said to one of my partners at the time, if this doesn't work, I have to move. I'll have to really do Chicago. Because in Chicago, you might get killed if you think something bad. This is not like, I might be meeting the weather. No, no, no. I mean these guys, we were money. You were not the witness protection, exactly.

These guys, who's your money, people kind of like, oh, I'm sad about it, Chicago would like break your legs, they'd burn your house down, man. It's all different. Oh, everything. All right, let's take another question. Oh, sorry.

No, keep going. No, the second thing, I mean, honestly the worst thing for me, the worst scary thing for me was just the people. I had three or four guys that had worked with Billing Cumbus before that, and I knew if I just felt, if I disappointed them if I if we failed

I would have felt terrible. Yeah. Yeah, it certainly makes you focus on the game. It's like being staked in poker. You play better Sir, I have a question for the 17th most important person from PayPal Obviously freedberg is my favorite bestie Let's go. Let's go, Eric. Unbelievable. The Friedberg loves. All right, Friedberg, soak it in. You've been talking about how all this increased money supplies has been sending the asset prices up.

And now it's unwinding. I don't think we've heard you talked about crypto specifically. Bitcoin has obviously come down, but it's still over three times where it was pre-pandemic. Curious what you think will happen in that world as this unlines. You want me to address that? Sure.

Or where we're going. It was for you. Seven three-moves in part. Yeah, I mean, so the thing about the crypto market to understand is that it's like a liquidity sponge. The more liquidity there is out there, the more people feel empowered to make speculative investments, and crypto is like the most speculative. Now, that's not to say, you know, it's not real. I actually do believe in Bitcoin. I think there'll be a number of other sort of alt currencies that work, but probably the vast majority will not, and there's been a tremendous amount

of speculation and inflation there, and so that space is in the process of correcting. You know, I've never been able to say like what the right price level is for you to stuff are. Let's say you believe in Bitcoin long term, let's say you believe it's going to be the first non-fiat currency, what price should that be today? It's, there's no like, discounted cash flow analysis you can apply to it. So it's always been very hard to know

what the prices of these things should be. And so in practice, the price of the function of how much liquidity is in the system. When you go through a period of liquidity getting destroyed, it's no surprise that crypto is lost with it. Antonio, have you touched them? You were so into physical assets and building real things like spaceships and rocket ships. When you watch this crypto bubble grow and burst and grow and burst and now it's burst

again, what's your take? Well, first I want to say I bought my first crypto, I mean, I think in 2017 because David Saxon and Billy were pushing the Ponzi scheme on me. So they were like, I was at a birthday party. I think you probably were there, too, yeah, and they were like, they were, they were hawking Bitcoin. So I bought something. Nobody had heard of it at that point. I bought something. I think it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was

like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like, it particular is a bet on rising political risk and on political freedom.

Economic freedom is closer to political freedom and last time I looked Ukrainian to the third largest holders of Bitcoin and if I were saying in Taiwan today I would have 10, 50% of mass is Bitcoin. So this removes the ability to control currency capital controls from governments. I think this is very important and it should survive. Price levels, I don't know, I do have a, you know, a reason why the Bitcoin is a hedge to political risk globally.

And that's how we think about it. We have invested in infrastructure assets in and around a blockchain with day we have a couple of assets. Because we believe that blockchain itself is a platform shift in the technology of tracking assets. This is a real thing and it's going to happen. It's going to change what we do finance, so we invest in infrastructure.

Got it. Let's take another question. Tyde is right. Mike over there. Oh, I'm sorry. We're going to take one from here. We'll alternate. So Tyde is right.

Yeah. Hi. Carmontrasio of Credo. I have to say I'm a science nerd, Friedberg. But J. Cal, Call has been awesome today. And I want to say you guys like your courage and bravery to do what you've done with the pod and watching this today. Like, thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, you've talked a lot about later stage. I'm wondering if you could tune in a little bit more on pre-seed and seed and kind of what you're seeing in terms of valuations and metrics that you've got to hit in the earlier stages. It's very simple. I invested in Uber, Thumbtack, and Com for $15 million combined. That was a combined valuation.

Post money. Post money. And those all three companies had products in the market. And then what we saw in the last five years is people wanting credit for a white paper, a prototype, an MVP to the tune of $15 to $50 million. And we did sit out some of those and said, listen, when the product is ready, let's take a look at the product

and talk to the first two or three customers to David's point about 0 to 1 customers is the really hard hurdle. And now it's back down to $6 to $15 million for a company that has a product in market. And maybe $5,000 to $100 times yearly revenue for evaluation. So to the extent you can get to 200k in yearly revenue, you can get a 10 to 20 million dollar evaluation. So I'd say halfway back to normal and perhaps

a permanent livable reset because the outcomes have been pretty fantastic. So the early stage should go up. The only thing you really need to raise money is to build a world-class product and just get a couple of customers who are absolutely blown away by what you've built. That's all you need. But everybody gets concerned with the theatrics and the performative stuff and their network

and nonsense and who you are and where you came from. None of it matters. Build a world-class product that two or three people are obsessed with and you'll get the C-check. Focus. Yeah, I think, Brad. If Brad Gersoner had, sorry, not enough to your applause, Jake, how? I know that's important to you.

I'll take one little like you get. So I think Brad Gersoner made a really important point on this, which is the new normal is going to look like the old normal, meaning the pre-COVID normal. We had the abnormal period was this to your COVID period where 10 trillion liquidity pumps at the system. Things are going back to what they look like before all of that happened

and maybe before the Fed started with this zero interest rate policy. So we're actually getting back to normal, understand that the environment we're actually getting back to normal, understand that the environment we're entering now is the normality. The abnormal period was the inflation we saw in Assets over the past couple of years. That's the like reset that everyone's gonna have to wrap their heads around. So, actually, my boy. Finally. Finally.

One percent. I think there may be some preference for fostercation around this because people don't want to admit they're conservative. All the polling shows this, so anyway, thank you, sir. And your second favorite bestiest Tucker go. For early stage tasks and besters, which most of you are, in an increasingly digital world where there are large-sass solutions for nearly everything, how do you think about selecting companies and founders in the early stage that are coming to market with a small amount of utility, and how do you think about the compete with companies with already established customer

distribution? Yeah, so I think one of the things I really like about SaaS, which is your software is a service, basically B2B software, it's business software, okay, that's sold as a subscription, is that the world's never going to run out of new ideas for business software. Business keeps changing, so therefore the software that businesses need will keep changing, and there will always be an opportunity there for new companies, new verticals, new niches, they'll always be new ideas. And so I'm never worried about running out in terms of how we evaluate the actual idea. We've actually been super transparent around the metrics that we need to see.

It really does start with a company hitting the metrics hurdle that we need to see for, for example, Series A. You know, it's a call it, you're roughly more or less a million dollars of ARR, you want to be growing 15% month of the month, certain net dollar attention, certain capital efficiency. We've all, we've published it, you know, on our website, on our blog. So it starts with that and then once we know that like our thresholds have been hit, then we get into more qualitative or subjective factors like, you know, what do we think about this founder in this market? But one thing I like about it is just, it's very well defined like what we're looking

for. And so, you know, just go to our blog, you'll see, we'll tell you exactly, there's no mystery to it. Outside of productivity tools, though, there's not a single company that can stay in one category and become really big. What does that mean? There's not a single public company that doesn't have now an entire strategy that says we sell at SMB, mid market, and enterprise.

And so the thing for SaaS businesses, unless you're like a really powerful productivity tool, like a Slack or an Atlassian, your valuation cap in the mid to high single digit billions as it currently stands today, that's just the law of the math in the public markets on how you're rewarded. Though how do you grow out of it, you have to embrace a strategy that actually does more where you become a system of record. So good example is like a Zen desk. They hit an upper bound. There are many of these examples.

And so if you're building a SaaS business or you're investing in a SaaS business, the other thing to think about is, in the absence of being a productivity tool, of which again, there are a few, everything else has to find a way of being applicable to larger bodies over time in order to maintain valuation.

We're gonna try and move faster so we can get people to question here. Hi there, guys. Favorite besties? Probably four-way tie, but maybe Chimoff edges out just a bit. Oh, yeah, okay. It's not a tie. So, try and go to Chimoff. Quick question. Tight is right. So, you know, you you guys done incredibly well. So what would you do if you're dropped in the middle of say,

Kansas, take away the resource, take away the network, and take you back to age 25? What would you do and why? Antonio, take it. I'm actually from Michigan. I got dropped in the middle of there with no resources, and not a lot to do. And I wasn't 25, I was in my early 20s.

I would find a way to make it work, man. You should actually, whenever skill you want to start at, whatever job you have, I would try and start a little company. There's always people that listen to a play-cigar, I'm a Michigan man, you can cut grass. I had a little computer company when I was 12 years old doing like networking for people in the old days. There's always something you can do if you had a valuable skill. Build a skill, start a company, and just get started, start moving, and make good decisions along the way. One good decision compounds on top of the other, and all

four of these guys, what they have done in their careers, has made very good decisions, and they've kept moving when they've had problems. And what do you start early? Yeah, you gotta start early. And I start early. I just want to tell you this, they may look like super successful guys now, NAR, but it wasn't

easy and it wasn't linear. They've all had ups and downs, they've all had problems. I still do. And they also do what they do, and I've great respect for all four of them, I know them all well. They keep making good decisions, they're highly resilient, and they just keep going. And I would tell you the same thing. You got to just keep it.

The only thing I'd add to that is to keep learning. I'm getting some positive. Oh yeah, you're going. And I would tell you the same thing. The only thing I add to that is to keep learning. I'm getting some closer. Oh, yeah, you're going. I haven't had any, man. I just got here. But I would just say keep learning as well. One of the biggest advantages I've had in my career is that I try to always learn as new stuff as often as I can. Whenever I find an area of interest, I pursue it in terms of deepening my understanding of it.

And that's always created opportunities for me that I wouldn't have just stumbled across or walked my way into. It's such a great opportunity to have you here in Tony. When I asked you to do this, you had never been on a podcast before. Have you never done this kind of thing? I've never done this kind of thing. No. It's awesome.

Thanks. I'm only doing it because it's a four of you. And I am usually very private, but I'm enjoying it. Good thing it's a credible voice. You know? It's like very light. Very NPR. It's very powerful.

Great, yeah. It's like, hey, everybody, you're listening to the politics and culture of voice. I'm Antonio Grasia. People tell me I have a voice for radio and pornography. Yeah. Voice pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. It works pretty well. Go.

OK, guys, I'm Samantha. Favorite Bestie is Friedberg. I run the factory automation team for a large semiconductor manufacturer in the United States. Really unimpressed with innovation and industrial automation. And so I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on where you see the next disruptions in automation and also maybe a question for Antonio, where do you see the

disruptor specifically and how we get not only the technology but the economies of scale for these really capital intensive businesses in the US. This is your guy at Kansas. For sure. And by the way, you should talk about automation. I don't know if you want to, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, we know a lot of automation. One of my partners is like a genius engineer

in this area. And your particular, you know, the chip business, you said, right? Yeah. So, you know, TSMC basically took the many, this idea of outsourcing manufacturing assets they didn't tell did with TSMC at the beginning, it created that business and moved most of our high technology and chips often offshore into Taiwan. This is like a terrible idea. And I think, as I said earlier, an industrial policy in this country, I think we need industrial policy

to bring cheap manufacturing back. It's very important. And the problem you have in automation, cheap manufacturing particular is, you know, when you think about where all the great engineers go today, they're good at automation. They're not going there because they're computer to SMC. So you have a couple of infilties still in the US, but we have to have some, I think actually

it's going to require industrial policy to force people like Intel, AMD to want to bring stuff back into the US, and to really get great talent to want to do it. Do you think there's opportunities outside of Greenfield models to kind of reinvigorate and unlock the capacity that we have in some of our older manufacturing here in the US? Yes, I do. I look at, we at Tesla took over the free, this free-mine factory was a former GM Toyota factory, and we re-tooled it.

It was, look, we would have been, we had to do it because we had any money, and it was free, basically. But if you took that approach and you got the, you got really great entrepreneurs to focus on this problem through an industrial policy, and you need money to do it. I think you'd get great innovation.

Look, Nvidia is actually here in the US. This is the round, this is a great chip company. And the fabs they use are screwed over the world. But if you gave Nvidia a favor to, who knows what happens, it was the right price. Yeah, Jensen's a great CEO. Do you go to that side? Favorite Bestie, Jason, you keep the ship together.

You're the glue that keeps it together. My name is Chris, my friend and I started all-in-talk nine months ago. Oh wow. The fan page for the... Thank you, Chair. It's really awesome. Obviously, I was at the outdoor mall in your house and my dog attacked another dog. And the guy was like, it's okay, I saw you on TikTok.

That was like... You know, I'm not... So that That was like, you know, not that. So that was because of you. But that was your channel? That was for his Kinwatt channel. It wasn't your channel, that was. So my question is in the 22, 22 predictions episode, Chamath, you talk about all in media idea and starting an all in media channel maybe.

And I wonder if you guys have talked about that anymore. Your goals for the future on that, because I'm pretty sure everyone would agree here that, if you did start one, it would do a whole lot better than CNN plus. So... Well, that may not be a very high bar, but a very low bar. I think it's...

We actually did get together the four of us. We sat in Freeberg's office. What a shit show. People started yelling. Two people walked out. The sacks just started to do this at the table. Yeah. I'm definitely a striper by the way.

It was not. It was not a striper. It wasn't a productive conversation. It was completely unproductive. It was completely unproductive. That was our first and only meeting. But we did take one key step, which is that Freberg said, I'm going to get my team to draft the LLC agreement

for the four of us. Which we refuse to sign. But I know no one signed it. But it's not our inbox. But it's in our inbox. So we're one step closer to starting it. But joking aside, I still think that it'll become inevitable, and I think the reason is the two people, the robots non-humans, that were uncomfortable with

human interaction, David's... I'm like, lifters. Once we do the recap of this, I think these two are probably the most shocked. I'll tell you, by the way, my observation, I used to go to TED, I went to TED from 2008 till 2019. I stopped going to TED because I thought the content went to shit. It basically got overtaken with social justice talks. You started like tech and interesting ideas about where the world's headed. I listened to our speakers this week the last two days and I'm like, man,

like really fantastic content. I'm like, this could be the new Ted. So I got really invigorated by that. Like I really thought, I felt like that was really nice. So. So. So. So.

So. And by the way, I think it's conversations people don't really seem to want to have, right? Like, and those are, well, let's just say you were not the earliest believer in this was going to get pulled off, too. I cannot tell you how many times I've considered quitting the pod and not even showing up for this event.

And I give Jason props publicly for doing a great job holding this thing off. So. So. Go. Go. Hey, guys. My name is Sarah.

And I really love all of you. You got me through a very tough challenging time when I started listening to you I came here over 16 hour flight from Abu Dhabi So thank you. Wow We love you. We love you I have a comment and a question the comment and maybe David I have a lot of relatives in Sweden, and when the Ukraine war started, this is very amiable, innovative, beautiful people. Heaven had a war over 150 years, and they were putting gas

in their car and supplying cans of goods and got really, really nervous about what's happening. And we're watching closely to see what would be the next step, I think, if the US didn't us up in. So there's a lot of reality out there for the US to stay, I don't know, like the savior of the world in a certain way or another, Finnish people felt the same way, Maldovans. So this is a real big reality out in the Western European world, not just Eastern Europe.

So that's on my comments, so thank you. For the question, and this comes from my husband. If you're sitting on access liquidity right now and want to invest for a long time. Sorry. It's actually raising a fund. What would you do? Was that a transition from World War III to... Investment advice, stock tips?

Stock tips? Yeah, I don't know if it's going to be in the market. We want to see. That is dynamic range right there. Yeah. Well done. Well done. You won. You've gone from two pulls.

You know, I mean, you had a problem. You know, the ups and downs of my life. So yes, it is like that. Why don't we just take the first part? Because I think it would be good. So on Ukraine, I thought it was important to have this debate today where we got both sides of the issue.

And we got two people who are very passionate on both sides. And I tend to agree more with Glenn on it, but that doesn't mean I don't want to help Ukraine at all. I just think we have to keep a close eye on preventing the thing from escalating into World War III. Because the Russians have 6,000 nuclear weapons, and their military doctrine says they can use them if they feel that they're accidentally threatened.

And so, you know, if our objective here is to help the Ukrainians expel the Russians from an invasion, that's one thing. But if our objective, if we have mission creeps into destabilizing the Russian regime, into basically trying to take back Crimea, which they see as theirs, if we're trying to weaken them to the point

where they're no longer a great power, we're really playing with fire there. So we have to be really careful about our objectives there and make sure that we don't let this thing spiral out of control. Antonio, what do you have thoughts on Ukraine and are we being too dovish or hawk? Yes, you're doing it just right. So I think we are, there's a lot more going on here than the Vemits, the I, and this question was about Sweden and Finland. And here's what I would say because I want to focus on that, that if our friends in particularly North-Western Europe should actually be armying themselves,

and if they are themselves, we won't have this problem. That's the reality of it. The reason Ukraine, yes, that's the reality of it. I'm obviously the lurking in the last set up. The time for sitting on the sidelines in central Europe is over. If you care about your country, care about your children, care about your families, then you should arm yourselves. Period full stop, and Americans will hear happy, say, you weapons. No problem. With it without NATO, I think that's true. The reason Ukrainians are able to defend themselves is because they

are, they have actually been buying weapons, and they bought, they built their own weapons with the Turks. The drones that are being used to destroy the Russians' supply lines are not coming from America, they're coming from a joint venture with the Turks. This is the reality. So, should we be drawn into a warrant some to Europe? No, I think it could start with worth three. Should we help these folks to find themselves? Yes, I should. And in Europe, are you a part of the world? Yeah, for sure. Start buying some weapons. One question over here. Yeah. Tough to follow, but my name is Joanna. Favorite Bestie. I think Friedberg, I think you do a good job of being heard and hearing others equally, so I think that's an important

skill, trying to work on it myself. More Friedberg. APPLAUSE Friedberg, wow. In terms of my question, it's a little more qualitative, but some of us were having an interesting discussion about first impressions last night. And I'm curious to think, one, in terms of your own first impressions,

how has the way that you introduce yourself to others changed as you've grown? And what have you learned about that? And on the other end, what are some of the most notable first impressions others have made on you and why have those stood out to you? It's an interesting question. Well, seeing as the only two of us have emotions maybe we can yeah, we can chop it out. Sure I'm gonna go to bathroom You won't find any emotions there

Turn the mic off. Please the key. Oh my god. Oh my God. Well, if that Baba Ganesh goes right through you, continue. Baba Ganesh, I think that when I was younger, I was more insecure, so I had to wear what few labels I had on my sleeve and use them as a weapon before others could use their labels on me. I honestly felt that way. In Silicon Valley at the time,

it really, there is a very monocultural aspect of folks from a few schools, folks having worked at a few companies and I had neither. I went to Waterloo, which is in Canada, and I worked at AOL. So I didn't go to Stanford and I didn't work at Google, or Yahoo. And there's a great lineage of where the really credentialed credible folks came from. And so you do what any insecure person does. You kind of throw what few things you have out there very

quickly, trying to one up the person in front of you. And that's calmed down a lot. So that's probably the biggest thing that's changed. I think it's a similar observation. When I was taking that art train into Manhattan, I used to say to myself, Jason Calacanis, editor in chief, Jason Calacanis, millionaire. And I was literally had a 16-page photo copy magazine,

called Silicon Outer Reporter. And I was trying to convince myself 16-page photo copy magazine, called Silicon Outer Reporter. And I was trying to convince myself that someday I would be somebody. And I think that narrative was important for me. And people when I would give them the 16-page photo copy, I'd say, here's my magazine. They'd say, there's a photo copy. I'd say, no, it's a magazine.

It's got a picture on the cover. Because for me, that was why it was a magazine. And it eventually became a very large magazine, in fact, of 300 pages. And today, thank you. So I think there is something about manifesting stuff, and just believing that you're going to get there. But today, I define myself by the things I love to do.

So when people do ask me now, hey, what do you do? I say I'm a writer, and I have a podcast. And I angel invest. And I don't say it's a number one podcast podcast or I'm one of the top angel investor all the time. I just think about what I don't say that. And I don't say, you know, like, you know, the book is in 11 languages or whatever. We've got a million dollar advance.

I just, there's no ego about it. I just say my daughter. Podcast her angel. Okay, how did it go in there? Okay, David, you okay? What sort of advance are you getting? A million dollars, he said. A million dollar advance.

I mean, the book's in 12 languages now, thank you. Now, Simon, if you have one, I'll sign it. Next question. Sometimes, I think Jason's just pimping out all of us to fuel his media career. You think? Sometimes? Just big? Hey David, all honesty, how is the deal flow gone since you got this podcast?

I think it's down 50%. That was the intent. That was the intent to more deal flow. That's the intent. That's the intent to work down the floor, and this way. That's the truth. Definitely, that's it. That's since you went on Tucker, go. Hi. Today, the crypto world is focused on decentralization, speculation,

and stores of value. Who here is excited about micro payments? And whoever is most excited, which industries do you think will be most impacted by the newfound ability to send payments in as little as 100th of a penny. Go ahead, for every bestie they want to. Do you want to take it? Yeah, good, sucked. So, you know, this question of micro payments has come up all the way since, you know,

back to when I was working on PayPal. And one of the problems with micro payments is, as the name suggests, the amounts are very, very small. So, you have to do a lot of them to create enough volume for them to be meaningful. And so there was always sort of this market size problem. Now, for crypto, there may be more of an opportunity there because the way that the old credit card rails network works is there's like a 25 cent charge per transaction. And so like a pay palette, it just didn't make sense to facilitate micro payments because the cost of that transaction always exceeded the fee

that we could get. So you're right that, or I think what you're suggesting with your question is that there is sort of a crypto opportunity to do this in a different way because you can basically do a costless instantaneous transfer using a blockchain based currency. So I'm sure someone's going to do something interesting with that. And then the question is just, how, like, what is that I read into? Is it going to be big enough to be able to? By the way, there's an interim step, which is also pretty obvious, at least to me,

which is this idea that, you know, for example, like if Stripe actually took the time to embrace one of these stable coins, there's no reason why Stripe needs to actually run on an interchange as well. Because you can just basically swap that dollar into USDC. Let's just pick that as an example, not to other, not to tilt to. Run it on those rails for free and then basically transfer it back. It's not obvious why people don't do it. You need the gas cost to come down. So you're running a transaction on Ethereum or certainly Bitcoin. transfer back and it's not it's not obvious why people do you need the gas cost to come down so

you know like you're running a transaction on Ethereum or certainly Bitcoin's rein spending on other change yeah yeah you need you need like a chain like us a lot or something that's like super cheap and the the cognitive load of the transaction just the person deciding do they want to pay a tenth of a penny a penny is sometimes greater than the actual value of the money Which then creates Almost like friction to them wanting to read the article Let's take another question

Hi, my name is Kate and my favorite bestie right now is freedberg who often plays devil's advocate and so forces a step I'm a wayward plays devil's advocate and so forces a step right in the way we treat them. Free bird. Woo! Free bird. My Lord, how many people did you pay off? Go ahead.

So we all admire your successes, but we've also been hearing from Mar, for instance, that we need to be comfortable with failure and we need to become resilient. So when you look back on your careers thus far, what have been the toughest moments, the moments when you've made a mistake that have taught you a lot. I mean I had two huge moments. And in Antonio. And just have some too. Yeah. You want to make mistakes. My mistakes. That you'll learn the most from.

Man, my biggest mistakes in life have been about people. And I have over the years made errors in judging people and how honest they were and how good they were. And as I look back on that, it's because I have a weakness for ideas that are great. And sometimes those come with great people and sometimes they don't. The reality is there are some bad people out there who are acting really great and doing interesting things.

And we have, we've suffered from that. I mean, I know David and I already deal with the other suffer from that. And it happens. So I would be, I've learned a lot about that. I've gone deep into neuroscience. Actually have a stat, we have a woman who's got a PhD in the neuroscience of emotion

from Caltech now on staff that helps us learn, as you said, always learning about how to assess people, how to assess their emotional states. That's the most important thing. I think we've updated in our process and in my own thinking. So you love the idea so much that you ignored the other data, that this person was not honorable, truthful.

No, I mean, so there are times when there are two kinds of this errors here. One type of error is we just didn't see it because the person was so good at being bad. They are, one of these neuroscientists taught us is that about five percent of the population has a brain anomaly that makes the maxill psychopaths defined as the embatialism fire properly

when they do something bad, guilt, fear, et cetera. And in our particular industry it's probably 10%. So we raised our base where it forecasted 10%, and it's gotten better, but there's something that's so good at it, you just can't see it. I mean, Theranos, Elizabeth Helms, okay. Like lots of smart people were wanting that company, we didn't, but it was an obvious thing, obviously. And then there are moments earlier on when we had yellow flags, we overrode, because we

were so mostly committed to the idea that we want we had a business we did was in the dental space was it was Medicaid dental cleanse for kids that were black and Hispanic and I'm from that demographic and I wanted to meet that great and the routies we over road yellow lights because we wanted to make it great and we failed. Jamathi we're gonna add some of your channels. I had two huge filters but they were more personal moments of learning for me. One was, you know, we were in the midst of building a phone,

and it didn't come to pass. And if I really think about what I thought the problem was, this was when I was at Facebook, what the problem then versus now, then, you know, I would have said, I was like, can I have a huge kind of thing in blah, blah, blah. Now, what I would have said is, you know, I didn't really understand my own limitations and what I was really asking of him in the board in that moment.

And then the second is there were all these moments that were people decisions at social capital that ultimately manifested in sub-quality financial and investment decisions. And had I had to do over again, I would not have ignored some of the red flags because I was so desirous to be in the game, to be in it that I probably looked the other way

a little bit on folks that I'll just give you the practical example. I remember in a $300 million fund, I put $25 or $30 million into Bitcoin at $50 bucks a coin. And when the thing went to like $150 or something, just the pressure to distribute was so high. And I had conviction, I had all of these things, I had all the voting control, I had everything to just say no.

And I didn't have the courage to understand my role as a leader versus something, you know, my job as an investment partner. And so you learn, you know, you learn what you're good at, you learn where your strengths are, and you try to just get better, try to fix those weaknesses. I mean, at the end of the day, what we're both saying is the same thing, which is ultimately, it has nothing to do with anybody else. It still comes back to you and what your skill set is and your toolbox and whether you're

upgrading your toolbox everything. Freedberg, Sachs, any mistakes that you're able to access through your CPUs in your long-term storage? Well, I think as you get older, you learn how to pick your battles better. your CPUs in your long-term storage? Well, I think if you get older, you learn how to pick your battles better. And you just have to decide like what are the occasions that are really worth fighting for which aren't, you know? And sometimes you just let it go and others you have to fight.

And just knowing when you should choose which path I think is really important. When you were using the guy you really want behind you in a battle is this guy. So phenomenal investor. Back when I was on the founder side of the table. Good brawler. Yeah, for sure. That's why I got him a similar sword for his birthday. You did?

Yeah, I'm sorry. A samurai sword. A samurai sword. The collection of samurai sword you saw in that apartment start with David Sacks and samurai sword. Oh, right. Yeah, thank you David. Very short, too. A very short kid's sword I played with it or something. It. Oh, right. Yeah, thank you David. Very short, too.

It's your kids trying to play with it or something. It was not a toy. Yes, not a toy. Friedberg, anything in that long-term storage tape drives? I've made a lot of mistakes. It's really hard. I'm very hard on myself. When I was young, I always said there's no limit. And I always believe that.

And when I hit walls in my life, it was very difficult, because it totally countered what I felt was possible. I always thought everything was going to be a success. There's no way I'm going to let anything fucking fail. There's no way I'm going to let anything fucking fail. There's no way I'm going to let anything not work. My voice is cracking, not because I'm crying because I'm losing my voice. So we know it's not what we need.

If you cry now, there's everybody's going to be free. We've never used to. Oh, I got it. I got it. It's all for the vote. It's all for the vote. He actually does have a motion to see. But I would say he's smart and kind.

Yeah. And a vegan. He's perfect. The biggest mistake I've made. He's my dream boy friend. Yeah. Maybe coming on the stage was the biggest mistake I've made. Drawing in the pot.

Oh, man. But I think Antonio's point is right. You just have to be willing to learn and evolve. It's, I now know that my life isn't about everything I do has to work 100% of the time. And being so hard on myself calls a lot of emotional challenges for me over time. But getting to this point where I can now be much more calculated and just move forward

quickly and learn from it has been a big evolution for me. That's just a general statement. Yeah. Oh, sorry, Jason. Well, no, it's okay. I was thinking about it while these guys were being so candid and I was immediately going to punt and go to the next question, but I thought that would be unfair. I think two things.

One, I think a lot of my decision making early on was that a fear, a fear of losing whatever I had gained up until that point. So, although I was a risk taker and I was being bold in one way, I was also throttling myself because I was just so scared that I would lose whatever gains I had. And it made me an imperfect manager of people, an imperfect person, maybe on edge a little too much and maybe not picking my battles to David's point. I saw everything as a battle because those wins were so important to me because they

were so hard fought. And then I think later in my life I realized I never actually thought about what I enjoyed. I just thought about winning. To an extent that was not healthy. And then after Dave Goldberg died and Tony Shade died, I really took a self-assessment of what I enjoyed doing, and I mentioned this yesterday, hanging out with these gentlemen and to Antonio's way of phrasing it, which is just beautiful in the fellowship.

I thought, that's the joy, my family, my kids, my wife, and this fellowship with my friends that I wanted to invest in. I made a deliberate effort to be a better friend, a better parent, a better husband, and because of all the gains I got from that, and they joy that I got from it. And I just thought a little bit, God, I do like those conversations. I do like writing the book, do like throwing the events. I'm just going to do things I enjoy, which took me 30 years in my career to actually assess what is it that I like?

And maybe I should enjoy the journey a little bit more. So I think it's a great question. I appreciate it. Let's take one more. Thank you. Enjoy the journey. Hi, Bestie. My name is Arya. I was the third or fourth employee at DoorDash. And my question is regarding... Oh, sorry. My favorite Bestie, yeah, that was a joke.

My favorite Bestie is Chimath and S joke, by the way, my favorite bestie is Chamath and Sax, although it's honestly Sophie's choice. My question is regarding the positive impact that Silicon Valley could have on the political discourse and politics, which I know, there's typically an aversion to intact. You all have done a fantastic job outlining what those problems are as well

as your guests. What I'm wondering is what a viable path forward looks like. You know, Chamath, you mentioned that people in DC pay close attention to the podcast. Sachs has recently endorsed Michael Schellenberger, which I really hope can save our home state. And I'm wondering is the solution, something akin to a third party, like what Andrew Yang is trying to do, or some new Silicon Valley techno party, or is there, what does that look like? I'm curious. Well, I don't think it's set up to actually have a third party, structurally in America. So what you have to do, practically speaking, is field more centrist normal people on both sides, whether they're Republicans or Democrats. That's a practical thing that we can all do, and then we can all show up and vote for those people so that the majority voice is much clearer than it is today, because right now the fringes a little bit

get to hijack the process. And so we take things that should be common sense and we pervert them in a way that just makes no progress possible. I really do think that we have that impact. I'm not sure how much of that can be quantified, but when I spend time in DC, I think it's true what I was told

and what I've heard from people, it's basically required listening or viewing. It helps shape people's opinions. It doesn't mean they follow it, but I think it helps people think about things in a more normal way. I think what happened today is like a perfect example. Like the way that Glenn Greenwald and Antonio Garcia Martinez debate, like that's probably for some of you, was really unsettling maybe. Raise your hand if you were just like you felt awkward, honestly just be honest with you. Okay well you

shouldn't because that's normal. My point is it helps you make it seem more normal because those guys were not saying to each other that you're worthless and you're not. They were just debating. By the way, we went out for a beer after that. Yeah, this is my point. So the three of us, I was like, okay, we need to go out and get a drink and cool down.

So I'm not chastising you for feeling that way. I'm just saying, this is what the culture does to folks. It makes you even afraid to hear people debate things and still have respect for each other. The way that he and Palmer kind of dealt with that, that's incredible. The courage that Palmer had to say what he did, and then for him to be the first guy to walk out and then to own that, that's a, I think those are really important moments. And you have 700 more people capable of being that way because of what just happened. So I think it's a slow march, but I think we're writing a small dent in a small way.

20 years ago, every political show on TV was a debate format. Like going all the way back to William F. Buckley versus Corvidol or Papi Cana versus Michael Cana's Leon Crossfire, I mean, there were all debates now, like none of them are debates. It's all just their own little echo chambers. I think it's one of the reasons why this part is successful is we actually can have debates and there is a divergence of views. What do you think, Antonio? Is there some...

Did you ever look into this pot? I was on one one, dancing in the background. Well, that's right. Yes, thank you, the dancing bear. Yeah, he did dance behind the back of the camera. I recorded an episode from his house. Yeah. When you look at politics, any interest there,

any behind the scenes work you've done, and how do you think about it, just as we get into, as Gen Xers, boomers are going away going away I mean we're going to kind of inherit this whether we like it or not yes I would I would say a whole things first whenever you have times you look historically I think it's important contextualize this when you have moments of of large technological change you always have political disruption because the means of communication have changed this the Gutenberg press the ship, and you just go back and look, it always leads

that light disruption and often to war. And so the question of are those of us who are technologists at the top of the system do they ever responsibility to steward this technology responsibly? We absolutely do. I believe we do. And I think that has been forgotten. That's number one. Number two, I have been involved in campaigns,

and it's interesting right now what I'm doing is supporting any centrist candidate that I think is good and either start of the aisle. I'm a registered Democrat, I support Democrats for most of my life, but the reality is now, all I care about is sensible people that I think are really good, and I'm engaging in micro-targing efforts

across the spectrum in primary races. I would encourage all of you, and anyone up here who cares about American book system to engage in the primaries. Because the primaries are what determines the quality of the candidates that actually are up for election. And they're actually decided by very few people. Like how many of us actually voted in primary? Like very few of you.

Very few of you. So few of you, OK? So rather than us just complain about the divisiveness of American politics, next time, please go vote in primary and go vote for the center's candidate. APPLAUSE By the way, did I hear a lot of support from Michael Schellenberger out there? CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Let's have him on the pod, maybe. Hi, favorite bus is Chimath. I heard you speak with Vinod Kostalat, I hacked the North of the University of Waterloo. So my question is, Amal talked about these start of journey systems like Stanford or PayPal. Do you see like over the pandemic, do you see any like remote or distributed systems

that have like appeared or do you see any like building that are not just centered in one geographical location? I'm really honest, I'm not a huge believer in this whole decentralized work movement. I don't think any high quality work can get done. On on on difficult problems. So I think that there are types of products and types of problems that can be solved in a remote way, certain forms of software for certain kinds of products. But for example, let's just say you're

trying to engineer a farm a drug. I don't believe that unless you're sitting there collaborating, talking, debating, you can do that necessarily over Zoom. If you're trying to build something physical, you know, we have a business that 3D prints rockets. Those guys can't do that by just, you know, zooming around and having a couple calls that doesn't happen. So I think it's too premature to kind of say working together has no value. I also think there's a huge cultural divide that will get created in America between these

companies that come together and the companies that don't. And I think that the ones that come together have a chance of having more empathy in the end because there are moments where you can actually get to know the people you're working with every day. And I think that that gives you margin for error because everybody sometimes is a little dealing with their own things in their lives, sometimes can be a little rude. And we all have tolerances. Those tolerances are higher when you spend time with people. And they're much, much lower when you're just in a Zoom.

So I'm, you know, I'd love to believe that everybody is going to be Airbnb and a castle and a tent in a fucking treehouse, but I'm just not sure that that's realistic to really solve the big problems that America has. You believe in the work from home, Antonio? You have a strong feeling one way or the other? I'm more on Chavoss Camp than not, but I will say we have some great companies are fully remote. We've got a coalition example in cybersecurity. It's fully remote, run by a wonderful CEO

is under the age of 35, and he's found a way to make it work. And I've learned a lot from him. And so I'm trying to be very open-align about this. And I think there are people who make it work, who give me, I can't make it work. I want my people in the office, we invest in pharma, we invest in biotech, and we have some biotech companies that have made it work remotely

and some that insist on bringing back people back. If you're in a lab, obviously, I feel you're back. But I think there'll be a mixed environment. And I also think there's an interesting retooling going on in productivity. I think the productivity numbers in America that we're seeing today are wrong because they're not capturing what's happening underneath

the technology because of these remote environments. So I don't know yet. I think it's going to depend on the CEO and how good people are and the type of industry you're in. Yeah, I'm keeping an open mind towards it. I know that for investing, it was so much more efficient. You know, people could do 20 minute zooms instead of two hour meetings.

No, but I mean, think of the problem that that created. Look at the overhang when you could raise tens of billions of dollars over zoom. That turned out to not be a good thing. Well, and but also if you're a capital allocator, being able to meet with three times as many people, you could find more companies. This is my point.

So I talked to a friend of mine who raised billions of dollars over the last couple of years cycle, and he said, I was able to raise $50 million checks in 30 minute meetings. Now it's spending five hours for a $10 million check. And my reaction to him in the back of my mind was, that's probably how it should be. Well, part of that's the quid and cycle too, right?

That makes the entire system a little bit healthier. Yeah, we raised one point similar to our funder in COVID and it was like all done to the zoo and reason new fund now and a fly around the world taking meetings. But part of that is because people come back to the office and the liquidity cycle's gotten, it's reversed on us now, right?

So the denominator's gotten, it's got a heart of the capital. But for sure, I think I agree that you're not here. Like, being able to allocate $10 billion in a venture fund in two years over Zoom, and think that's on just the metrics and not see people, I think that's a bad idea. Yeah, I'm talking about 250K, 500K checks. Yeah, that's OK.

My favorite. Take another question here. My name is Kenneth Brown III, and my favorite bestie is J. Cal. The charisma is legendary. He's my favorite bestie to you, by the way, he'll be offended. And then my question is, what advice would you give to non-tentical people trying to fit into the tech-oriented startup venture world? I'm an econ major, but this just seems exciting.

Like, how do I become a part of it? And Tony, you have thoughts? And I think that the best way to do this is to find a company you think is great and get a job. That's a reality. I mean, I would associate myself with the business that I really respect, the audience. And if the job is in the mailroom,

the job is a janitor, whatever. Just figured out because what it happens to high growth companies is they need good people and you'll be surprised how much being the first person in and the last person to leave if there's an office and doing the work that you will ask you to do with a smile and a great attitude like those people name you up fast so I would just find a way in man wherever it is however it is make it happen and start moving up. You're not non-technical.

You're not yet technical. And I think that's the opportunity that sits in front of everyone that you can become technical. I had a cousin who was a music major at UCLA, worked in music. And then he came back from COVID, and he started learning how to program online, taught himself, spent six months in his parents' basement, teaching himself how to retool his life, and got some contract jobs on Reddit and boards and other stuff, and he got this amazing full-time job

offer a few weeks ago. And it was really amazing that I got to watch him transform himself in his life over the last year and a half, just by taking that on himself and he became technical. It wasn't that he had a non-technical degree. It said he just wasn't yet technical. And I think everyone has that opportunity. I'll tell you a great quick story. He's a minority guy, grew up in Houston.

Really wanted to work at Tesla. Couldn't get a job, couldn't get a job, couldn't get a job. Finally got a job on the line. He was making $16, $20 an hour. Work there, did well, transferred, worked there, did well, transferred, worked there, did well, transferred, ends up in the supply chain group, ends up working in battery supply chain,

ends up basically being two layers between him and Elon. Gets into an MBA, goes there for a few years, works on the side, and he ended up raising a bunch of money to start a battery business recently. And this is an example of what he just said, which is, you know, there are these jobs available, and then it's just, you know, is your hood spun, your hustle, and he's an example, but it's a very motivating example to me, because it just shows it's so possible, you know, and these, there are phenomenal organizations that identify talent and will move you up really quickly.

And knowledge is literally free. And experience is up to you. Yeah, the overriding, I think, advice you're getting here is that skills are a requirement. And my lord, getting to 50%, 60% proficiency on a skill, just given what's on YouTube or MIT OpenCourse, where any number of websites, you can do it in a

matter of weeks. And now of course, going from 60, 70, 70 to 80, that might take months and then eventually years. But startups are looking for generalists. They're looking for people who can say, I need somebody who's going to do the accounting and figure out how to do an email merge and build a mailing list. And then I need somebody to help with recruiting.

If you could just become 30, 40, 50 percent as good at each of those things at a start-up, you know, before people get specialized, eventually you'll have 10 people doing recruiting. But in the beginning, it's one third of somebody's job. That's right. I love startups for that. The sign of a great culture of a company is how little the obvious labels matter once you're inside of it. And the best companies like a Tesla can become a trillion dollar market cap because they find

the kid working on the line and then four years later is running the battery supply chain. How does that happen? It happens because you're looking at the quality of the individual and their potential, where they went to school doesn't matter, their gender doesn't matter, their ethnicity doesn't matter, none of it matters because the people don't see it. They see work ethic, they see effort, they see integrity.

So that's another litmus test for you, is like in the companies, even if you're a CEO and if you're building, if every other day you're reminding everybody else of like where people need to have gone to school and where they should have been that's a road to nowhere. Let's give Antenna a big round of applause. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Next question. Thank you guys. Yeah. Sonny Lambo. You're really too happy. I know. I feel bad.

He's like, I've never been on a show before. He's like an L.D. meeting. He's like, I have. All right. We're going to just take 14 to 20 more questions. Go. Sonny Lambo here. Chimots may fear it bestie.

Yeah, you go. Because I've got my little dry spell. Because of him, I shop at Laura Piano only. So thank you. So I just got a question for Friedberg. I know that you wanted to talk about this yesterday about this sort of consumer credit crisis on the horizon that you see as Potentially like the next shoe to drop so I think you wanted to mention something yesterday about it, but because of time and stuff

I mean, I don't remember any more to add than what I said on the pot. I'm not like I don't think this is like High certainty. I'm just concerned. There's a lot of loans out there a lot buy now pay later, a lot of stuff that has floating rates attached to it. If we're going to have a recession, we're going to see job loss, you're going to see these, and by the way, these auto loan portfolios have like crazy outperformed over the last few years, and now that these, and a lot of those auto loans are floating rate, those asset values are inflated, people are losing jobs. You could see a bunch of these things start to create a bit of a cascading effect over the next couple quarters, depending on how this all goes.

So I'm not going to put my foot down on the ground and say, oh my god, consumer credit bubble, we're totally fucked. It's going to lead to the great next great recession. But I do think it's going to be pretty kind of surprising. By now pay later, I saw stat, I don't know if you guys saw this this week, on how a lot of the people that are going on Buy now pay later sites are actually maxed out on their credit cards And so they're actually fully credited out and then all the smart algorithms are like oh, yeah, you're a good credit risk

Like here's here's $1800 a lightening round lightning round five questions and we're done. Yeah one bestie will answer It's question go cool Free burger my favorite bestie. What problem do you most want to solve right now? Oh, binary lifters actually. I had a volcano. Oh. Actually, I've been working on the...

So, look, I've spoken about this publicly. I think it's a big problem. I was going to talk about it in the talk that we scrapped, but I'll do it another time, which is really the opportunity for bio-manufacturing as a way to replace a lot of traditional food systems, including all of Ag, all of animal agriculture, and a lot of the systems that we use to basically make our food.

It's a big infrastructure play. A couple of square miles using Elon's analogy, you could basically recreate all the food on Earth, you could distribute those systems. And so I think that it can be extremely carbon negative, it sucks carbon out of the atmosphere, it will create incredible jobs, it's an incredible infrastructure opportunity, it would return billions of acres of land back to kind of whatever you know, whatever form natural form we want them to be. So that's an area that I'm spending a lot of time in and that I'm particularly excited about.

Awesome. Thank you. OK. Number two. Hi there. I'm Katie Kroff. Nice to meet you all. Imagine a parallel timeline where I say you're all my favorite because it's all true.

So I'm curious kind of extension of the media question. Have you given much thought to forming a consortium or community with the all-in podcast and kind of what further applications of that? Because if you think about the forced multiplicity of like any number of these minds in the same room, working towards the problems we've talked about from education to on-touring energy, it could probably be pretty considerable the impact there. Because we have such respect for what you guys do and how you're doing it and the discourse you're having that, you know, work clearly all die hearts here.

So I'm just curious if you thought about it. I'm kind of trying to inception your hair. Do you know how you want to think that? Yeah, I think so. I mean, this is a shit ton of work. But I think it is and we all have day jobs. You know, step one was to try to just see, and I told the best, is let's just see if we can each make getting to the pot each week a priority and a habit.

And that took the first year or so. So now it is a habit. We all value doing this. It has had tremendous impact on our lives, personally and professionally. It's been very inspiring for each of us. So we had to lock into that first. Doing this, you know, was a ton of work and

we'll see if it's sustainable. And we have some other ideas. We wanted to do a college tour, was the other thing we were considering, which would be like 3000 seats or 4000 seats. And just an episode of the pot in Q&A. So I think that could be the next part to fall. And then maybe hiring Tim Urban and Nate Silver and then having the build immediate company to take on CNN. We have really given him much thought, but you never know. We're here totally random. We are.

We're not recruiting or anything, but you know anything's possible. Hi, Bestie's again. I'm rejoice. I run a talent marketplace for early entry workers. We use gamification to accelerate their app. That's what I remember. Yes. The question is about the great resignation, which we believe is the half-tote narrative.

So how can small businesses, which are most sole proprietors, democratize their own labor supply in demand? Wow. I think that's a very difficult problem to solve. I think, again, as a supporter of capitalism, I think one of the biggest things that we don't get right is how money gets to the right problems. I've said this roughly before, but money is really just

a voting way of deciding what you think is important in the world. And that's why the accumulation of money as just a practical matter, forget moral or philosophical, is so important because you can vote what you want. The thing is that aggregation happens easily, distribution is terribly broken.

And so the ability for folks to solve practical problems is very hard because the ROI isn't obvious. And getting money from capital pools like us So the ability for folks to solve practical problems is very hard because the ROI isn't obvious. And getting money from capital pools like us to individuals and sole proprietors is a basic, I think it is a very broken problem. A, because the systems don't exist. B, because the laws don't allow it. And until that gets solved, I'm not exactly sure how a business who can actually like build

for the future well or solve their supply forecast or demand forecast can actually get the capital you need because the lubricant that allows you to solve that problem is money. Has always been, will always be, but getting it to those people is legally hard and it's organizationally impractical. I don't know if you saw the last spot, I mentioned this thing, we tried this thing called capital as a service. It doesn't get to the sole proprietor level but it gets to like small 5 to 10 person companies. We would send $50,000,000 checks. Here's how hard it is. The cost of getting a $50,000 check, we did this fishery in Indonesia.

It cost us $125,000 to give them them 50,000. We still did it because I just wanted to prove the point. They ended up tripling our money so we barely kind of like broke even. But it just goes to show you how really complicated. Okay, fourth question and then one more after that. Hey, I'm Prem as a Waterloo poker player, favorite besties, to Moth. I'm very into next-gen manufacturing, but as a pre-seed investor, my concern is follow-on financing. How do we get more investors interested in investing

in the physical world, because at least in Canada, it seems like most investors only want to invest in software? No, I think this is what I'm saying. I think there's a very broken part of the capitalism right now, which is that technology investors buy in large and I don't mean to disparage anyone here, are not well rooted in the principles of math and finance.

And I think that that's a real problem because in a moment like this, that is where you can actually make safe investments of capital. You can structure the money in so that you are capital protected, you have assets to back these things. And the reason why folks don't do it is they don't understand how to put together a model to demonstrate it. And then the person that is

then receiving that information is unfortunately not as well instructed as they should be to understand how to make a decision from that. That's what we have today. So it's a little bit of a miseducation problem. And it's gonna affect the non-sexy areas. Rockets will always get money, but like 3D manufacturing at scale may not, because of this exact issue because people don't know what Royk means.

Sir, you have the final question. Favorite bestie is Freeberg. And hate to end on a recession question. I can cry. Yes. But never ask in that questioning, M. I can cry. Oh, I've never asked in that question again. Why do you guys, let me ask, why do you guys think it upsets you so much? Well, because you're the biggest pain in the ass. You are the most fucking neurotic person.

Every time we post it episode, which is canceling episode, we fucked everything up again. Why do we keep screwing up? We're going to destroy the fuck. I read the first few comments and the down vote rate. I was on YouTube, somebody sent the vote. They'll keep going, but go ahead. Yeah.

I have the amount of noise we deal with from this one verse. They're not gonna stop. It's like literally his inner mom. He does, you should not reward him. It's like his inner mom who are feeding crazy. You know if you had a two-year-old child who you've given too much candy to, can you shut him up please?

Yeah, unbelievable. This is my final part. One guy can shut your mouth up. It's filled to it, everyone. Yeah. Alright, so it seems like a common theme on the stage. These Oscar bullets is you all feel like we're in a recession or heading towards a recession. But I get a feeling that you have the confidence that this is going to be a quick recession

like a year. So my question would be why do you feel after 13 years of market manipulation by the Fed that is going to be cured in under a year? No, I think you're right. The average recession as measured, like if you look back historically, is two quarters. The problem is that we've never really figured out what it's going to take with the distortion of money that never should have been in the system. Because if you think of a supply-debanded balance as being a naturally self-balancing phenomenon,

if you perturb one side of it by an enormous amount, exactly to your point, I think the open question that the world has right now, is that really a two-quarter problem? Well, the Fed has told you that they're going to take three years to get three trillion. You've heard from David that 10 trillion was put in. Probably another three or four trillion was productively used. But that still leaves another three trillion of sloshing around money that we don't know. So I think it's an open question. I don't know what you guys think.

How many months? How many quarters? Sax? How many quarters, sacks, how many quarters, if you had to guess? I just hate this definition of recession, where it's about GDP decline when we had a lot of the underlines in those numbers for GDP that I feel were artificially inflated for a couple of quarters because of a bunch of the structural stuff we've talked about.

So I don't know, if you look deeper at economic growth, companies signing up more customers, a lot of technology companies are about increasing productivity with their tools, with their selling. And those businesses are going to continue to do well and to grow and to increase customers, increase revenue. And I don't think that there is necessarily a lot of the structural stuff that we saw with the GFC. The one thing I am concerned about, which I've highlighted is this consumer credit risk.

And besides that, it seems like, you know, things are, you know, on good footing. So I don't know, like, the technical recession definition, probably a couple quarters. Yeah. You never know, and I think the best way to look at the future is by doing scenario planning So we basically we could say this could be a You know short medium or long recession short would be six months medium might be 18 months and You know long might be two years plus and we just say I don't know say one third one third one third probability and That kind of gives you some picture.

What's the fourth or second? Exactly, so now what we're telling our portfolio companies is you want to have two and a half years of runway right now, because you got to go raise six months before you run out of cash, and you really want to have two years of cushion because things could be choppy for two years. I'm not saying they're going to be, but they could be. You don't want your company

to run out of money and die just because of macroeconomic conditions that are no fault of your own. So if you can try to engineer that amount of runway, that's better. I also think that here's the thing about a quick recession is, or the prospect for one, we don't know what other shoes are going to drop. Consumer credit is still a shoe that we don't know if it's going to drop. Look, six months ago, did we think we'd be talking about Tiger Global or software for that matter, potentially teetering on the verge of being... What, Tom?

Yeah, redempted out of this. Or Coinbase in Peloton, just... So things can change fast. We don't know what systemic risk is in the system that hasn't been flushed out yet And I we won't be out of this until it feels like everything's been flushed out and then the markets back and things are sort of an upward trajectory again Really clearly we're not there or real estate in crypto. It doesn't feel like that's where I should out yet either so Do we have a clip to play as an outro? I don't know

It's just a it was just a clip of the cut clip? Before we go, can we please say thanks to the two of them? Yeah, we're going to have networks here. Yeah. And the team, facing your team at all in. Incredible. Thanks everybody. All of you guys have really good so far. And they really put a lot of effort into this.

Pretty incredible. I guess this is a lost clip of us from last week. You did not have like a dungeon dragon sleepovers and grade seven and grade eight. I was actually programming Pascal and we made a water moisturizer and it was a binary lifter, much like the ones you have a tattooed.

We made a complete replica of Uncle Owen's water vaporizers on tattooed and that took six years. But it was great. And then I went hilariously, I see three PO. I went and see three PO to our science fair. You should have seen the look on our teacher's faces. Okay, you guys have your cold open. Let's go. I love you guys!

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